Snareville (14 page)

“
Now you've got
two
hormonal women to deal with, Danny Death," Jenny chortled. "Keep this up, and we’ll have to change your name."

“
Come here," Pepper said, lifting the sheets. "I’ve got another surprise for you.”

Danny gazed at her in the soft light. “You shaved.”

“
Well, technically, Jen shaved some of me. I got what I could reach. Forgot what a pain it is.”

Danny smiled and slid under the covers. “Wanna make
sure
you're pregnant?”

He wrapped her up in his arms. It was strange to feel her so smooth against him. He’d never had that with Pepper before. He pressed his lips gently against hers, then shared a kiss with Jenny. Pepper brushed his cheek with her fingers and drew him close.

Two days later, Danny rolled to the edge of Princeton with his platoon. They rode in the armored trucks, every person armed and fully loaded. In addition to his platoon, Plow Ridge sent five from their group. Boss Connie led that squad. Danny wanted more help, but Ken couldn’t spare the other platoons. Some were cutting ice, and some were cutting wood. The ice would go in the two new ice houses to be stored for summer. The wood would keep them warm in the cold months.

Jenny and Sandy stayed home, along with all the other women more than three months pregnant. Even with the Mennonites, the mission only boasted twenty-five bodies.

They parked their trucks in the radio station lot. The wind ripped away their breath as they stepped down from the rigs. The temps were in the low twenties with a hard northern blowing. Each person stood bundled against the cold. Each checked his or her weapons. Each checked his or her marker.

“
We’re going to try this as a large group today,” Danny said. "We want to locate Zeds."

Pepper stood next to him. She hopped from one foot to the other to keep warm. Roach stood silently within the group. He hadn’t been issued a rifle, but he kept a pistol in his belt.

“
Once we find some, we put an
X
on the wall or door where it can be seen. If the building is empty, we put a
0
on it. Questions?”

No one spoke up. Without further ado, the group worked its way into town. First, they checked the radio station. Nothing. They started into the residential area, and Danny split up the group. Each segment searched houses on opposite sides of the street. They quickly discovered that not just one or two Zeds were to be found in hiding. They found clusters. Five here, a dozen there. They marked each house. Some of the deaders twitched a little, but none moved more than a finger. Now and then, a pistol shot echoed across the frozen day.

After four hours, the group gathered back at the trucks. They'd located nearly a hundred Zeds scattered throughout the houses in the first six blocks of town. They'd also discovered it was easy to tell if a house was being used or not. If no Zeds lurked inside, the home remained pristine like the day in May when the owners left it. If there
were
deaders inside, the place looked like a slaughterhouse and smelled about the same. They'd yet to find any other living humans in Princeton.

The group tallied up their counts as they sat around the trucks and ate lunch. No one brought a real appetite, but one didn’t skip meals these days.

“
Well, what now, Boss?” Connie asked, hands curled around a mug of coffee.

“
We can’t burn down all these houses. We’d end up sending up the whole town.”

“
What if we take ‘em someplace where we can pile ‘em up?” Roach asked.

“
Good idea. We can throw them in the back of the trucks and dump ‘em. Any suggestions as to where?”

Roach jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the Pentecostal Church behind them. “How’s that? Big building. Made outta wood, from what I can tell.”

The others stared at him. Pepper spoke first. “That’s desecration, isn’t it?”

Roach shrugged. “It’s what we need.”

Danny interjected. “He’s right. It’s a big, empty building. I don’t reckon God’s home much these days.”

They decided to check it out. The tall, white cross stood out front. At night, it was supposed to light up to remind folks about their Savior. It hadn’t lit up for a few months.

Danny led the others through the steel doors, and the stench hit them—a putrid mixture of meat, rot, and shit. The odors blended into a physical wall that assaulted the senses, strong enough to be tasted even in the cold.

Pepper turned to a wastebasket just inside the entrance and heaved her lunch.

“
We’ve found this a lot,” Boss Connie remarked. “Church doors are usually open to all. The Zeds just found an easy place to hole up.”

The group stepped into the sanctuary.

“
Madre de Dios
,” Pepper whispered, crossing herself.

Boss Connie did the same, along with a few others. Even Roach paused, speechless for a change.

Hundreds of zombies sat or sprawled throughout the room. Some were dressed in their Sunday finest; some were nude. Most were missing body parts. Some lounged with their intestines spilled out. Danny saw white-tile floors stained with blood, carpets soaked in the juices of decay, and walls splattered with gore. On the communion table lay what was left of a human corpse with its brains smashed out, bones stripped of flesh, and guts slung across the floor. On the altar, human bones piled six feet deep. Here and there, members of this congregation of the damned clutched tattered meat in frozen hands.

“
Sweet Jesus,” Danny muttered. “I don’t think it’d be desecration to burn this place so much as a cleansing.”

Their breath left plumes of gray in the defiled room. Even Danny’s stomach churned, and he'd seen a lot of horrors since all this started a few months back.

“
All right, we’ve got our burn pile," he said. "Let’s get moving. We’ll drag the others here and light it up.”

“
We can’t burn the whole thing, Danny,” Pepper objected.

“
What do you mean?”

“
Records and such. Those need to be saved.”

Danny sighed. “All right. Find the office. Find the vital records and things like that. Haul them outside. We’ll store them somewhere else.”

“
I’ll help,” Roach said.

“
The hell you will,” Danny replied.

“
No, he’s a good thief," Pepper said. "He knows how to get into locked rooms.”

Danny glared at the man. “I
will
kill you, you know.”

“
Yeah,” Roach said. He stared at the floor.

“
As long as we both know where we stand.”

Danny left with the rest of the platoon. With their trucks started, they went to retrieve the other Zeds. Pepper wandered into the back hall, searching for the church office. She quickly found what she wanted and opened the door. The secretary’s office smelled bad, too. Pepper cleared the room, pistol drawn. She saw no one. She and Roach found the records they wanted. The documents went back all the way into the 1800s, from back before the church changed its affiliation. They carried five piles of records out front while Danny and his crew brought in more Zeds and stacked them in the sanctuary.

At one point, between runs, Pepper stepped into the big room. Scattered on the altar lay the communion plates. Someone had used the gold cross, smeared with blood, to open skulls. It rested next to the eviscerated body on the table.

“
I’d like to save the relics,” Pepper said as Roach came up behind her, “but I can’t go up there.”

“
Yeah, pretty nasty,” Roach agreed. He grabbed her by the collar and spun her to face him. “You told your boyfriend about us?”

“
Have you lost your mind?" Pepper blurted. "Let me go!”

He grabbed a handful of her short hair. “
Did
you?”

She shoved at his clutching hand. “
Ow
! No, I haven’t told him anything about you! Let me go, Roach!"

“
Not ‘til I shag your little brown ass again, Bitch.”

“
What
?”

“
One last time, for old time’s sake. Then I leave you alone.”

“
Fuck you, Roach! I’m not giving you anything.”

He smashed the barrel of his pistol across her nose. She felt it crush against her cheek. Blood rushed down her face.

“
Didn’t ask you. I said I was goin’ to.” He punched her, splitting her lip. “Did you forget how Worm an' I broke you in? You want
that
again?”

He shoved her to the floor, and Pepper spat a wad of blood on the carpet. Roach punched her again. Her ears rang. Spots exploded before her eyes. Roach opened his pants and reached for her coveralls. He started to unzip them, but they stuck halfway.

“
Shit… why you gotta wear so many clothes?”

He fought with Pepper's zipper as she swayed on her hands and knees. It came loose and went down. She was still fully dressed underneath.

“
Fuck,” he muttered. “Now we gotta do this the hard way.”

He pulled a long knife from his belt and began to cut her pants off.

Her
breaking in
. She'd nearly put that out of her mind. It only came to her in nightmares now. Worm and Roach did things to her in exchange for her life that she'd only heard about through snuff films. Now it was happening again.

Roach yanked at her pants. Pepper just prayed for it to be over as she collapsed to the floor. Her stomach churned.

“
Wait,” she managed. “Wait, Roach… I’m pregnant.”

“
Good. Then we know the brat ain’t mine.”

Pepper snapped back into herself. Rage welled. For the first time, she did something new: she screamed for help.

Her voice shattered the stillness. She kicked. She punched. She screamed. First she screamed for Danny, then for Connie, then for Danny again.

Roach tried to quiet her as she flailed under him. He dropped his knife as he tried to cover her mouth with both hands.

“
Get off her!”

That voice didn’t take back-talk. Connie stepped into the room, shotgun up.

Roach straightened, still on his knees with his pants down.

“
I… she…”

He fumbled for words, and Pepper buried the blade of his knife sideways though his throat.

Blood spurted across her coveralls. She yanked the blade forward, and air hissed from Roach's lungs as his windpipe split wide. His mouth opened and closed like a landed carp's. His eyes bulged from his head as he struggled to stand, one hand clutching at his throat. He tumbled backward into the aisle instead.

Then Danny Death was there, pistol drawn. He took one look and slid the gun back into his belt as he rushed to Pepper. He pulled her to her feet, zipped up her coveralls, and wrapped her up in his arms. Roach’s feet kicked out twice more, then his head lolled to one side and stopped.

“
Guess I didn’t have to worry about you.”

“
Yes, you did. Glad you came back.”

“
This is the last time I leave you.”

“
Good.”

Danny held Pepper tight as he walked her to the door. There, he handed her over to Connie, who led her to the truck and helped with her face. The group had one last load of Zeds to drop off. They left Roach inside and tossed the rotten bodies on top of his. Soon, they couldn’t pick him out from under the pile of older corpses. They poured on the diesel fuel and burned the church to the ground.

Greasy, black smoke rose into the twilight sky. No longer did they have to fear the night. That might change when spring warmed their days, but for now, life was as normal as could be expected.

Danny sat on the tailgate of his truck with one arm wrapped around Pepper. He gazed at her swollen eyes and puffy lip. A shiver of fear ran through him.

Pepper glanced up at him and tried to smile.

“
When I saw you in there today… it scared me, Pep. I didn’t realize how much I loved you, and I thought I might lose you.” Danny pulled her close. “You and Jen and the babies are the most important things in my life. I ain’t been scared like that before.”

Pepper wrapped both arms around him and gave him a squeeze. “I love you, too, Danny. You and the babies and Jen. I love you all. That saved me today.”

“
What do you mean?”

“
I’ll tell you later. Right now, I just don’t want to think.”

“
Okay.”

They sat there and let the flames warm their faces until well after dark. Then the platoon loaded up in the trucks and drove home.

“
Your son shouldn’t use Mommy as a soccer ball,” Jenny said, rubbing her tummy. “Here… talk to this child.”

She grabbed my hand and put it on her belly. I could feel the little one jump underneath my touch. Before long, the kicking stopped. I never could explain that. The baby always calmed down when I rubbed him.